IFEL 4MB RAM expansion

The Acorn A3010 shipped with 1MB of RAM fitted and although the architecture of the Acorn hardware supported a maximum of 4MB of RAM per MEMC chip, the A3010 only officially supported a 1MB or 2MB configurations despite the jumpers being able to configure the RAM size to 1MB, 2MB or 4MB of RAM.

It was left to third party hardware developers to create 4MB RAM expansions and the IFEL board pictured is one such expansion.

The IFEL 4MB RAM expansion plugs into the two 1MB RAM expansion sockets which were designed to accept two 512Kb ZIP RAM chips used to upgrade the machine to 2MB by adding a total of 1MB of RAM to the existing 1MB of RAM fitted to the motherboard.

The IFEL board is a full memory replacement in that once fitted and the motherboard jumpers configured to 4MB, it provides the full 4MB of RAM to the A3010. The 1MB of RAM on the motherboard is not used in this configuration.

Acorn left a convenient aperture in the shielding so that RAM chips could be fitted to the A3010 without having to fully dismantle the computer however due to the need to apply an even amount of force to the IFEL board when fitting, and alignment issues, it's actually easier to fit the IFEL board by removing the shielding in full allowing much greater access to the motherboard as can be seen in the photo below.